In its latest newsletter, the team behind blockchain-based cloud storage and drive sharing platform Storj outlined the interlocking components that it may utilize.

For a multiparty transport protocol, they have selected Swift, which is described as ‘bittorrent at the transport layer’ and more suited to streaming. Swift is also used by Tribler, which is a P2P BitTorrent client that doesn’t require a tracker for finding content and utilizes onion routing for more anonymity.

For their drive farming software, they are looking at schemes that will prove the existance of a file on a remote server without downloading the entire file, such as proof of storage scheme Merkle, and proof of retreivability schemes Swizzle and RSA’s HAIL. There are descriptions of both Merkle and Swizzle on Storj’s Github page.

The Storj team also plans to initially use peer to peer data distribution and communication protocol Telehash for drive sharing bid broadcasts and contract negotiations.

Notable comments from the Storj team included:

Our end goal is for the basic Storj platform to be a low-level, decentralized marketplace for data… By allowing for a marketplace this opens things up for heterogeneity and different competitive niches to exist… Storj software components will be as modular as possible, so people could swap in better file shard construction algorithms, different version contracts can support different verification schemes.

They also discussed a technical roadmap that relies on the progress of ideas covered in the newsletter.

The roadmap will give the community and developers a better idea of where we are, what is being worked on, and where we’re going. This will make it easier for people to jump in and offer help, grow the project, and accelerate development.

They called for patience from their community of developers:

Patience: we had a lot of rapid progress and made a big push but it’s important to remember we’re building a platform and it’s imperative to do it in a solid fashion. It is necessary to invest time now to make things better and speed up development later.

Storj also set some contribution guidelines:

As part of architecture and roadmap push, we’ve also put together some initial contribution guidelines for people looking to commit. It’s important to maintain a high-quality codebase, so that developers who want to contribute and/or submit prs need to follow the guidelines.
Storj’s Codebase is mostly Python with a rapidly growing C/C++ base that can interface to Python, so developers highly proficient in one or all of these languages are welcome to start pitching in:

First on helping to formalize the architecture and roadmap.

Then on building the platform, of course.

Those with experience in distributed systems and cryptography, and the ones with solid programming skills are encouraged to contribute.